Susanna Tamaro, Answer Me, 2001

A worthwhile collection of stories that explores that heavily populated border between Catholicism and atheism. There is something precarious about all the characters in these three novelettes, raised on religion yet finding themselves in long-term situations where religious faith does not help: in ‘Hell Does Not Exist’, easily the best story, an abused wife attempts to protect her young son from his violent father, and yet as a teenager the son becomes the cause of personal devastation. In ‘Answer Me’ an orphaned girl with a troubled past searches for signs that she is loved while cultivating an inner hardness that allows her to carry on, and in ‘The Burning Forest’ a widower gives an account of the unravelling of his marriage while seeking the forgiveness of his estranged daughter. I was rather taken with these stories, or rather the Stygian voice with which Tamaro relates them. They were certainly not comfortable reads – I expect for people with faith they would be even less so – and their quiet power is both startling and a little disturbing. This is fiction that doesn’t shout its atheism, just quietly points out how Christianity can indeed be either an unhelpful distraction when dealing with some life’s major problems, or even the cause of them. A dark book, and necessarily so.  PY

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Tony Parsons, Departures, 2011

In August 2011 Tony Parsons became writer-in-residence at Heathrow’s Terminal 5, and these seven interlinked short stories are the result of that fruitful week. Having been connected with Heathrow for most of my professional life I thought this collection might be a bit of an unrewarding ‘busman’s holiday’, but it’s the details of the working lives of other Heathrow mavens that really caught my eye, and for readers unconnected with Heathrow other than when just passing through these stories will probably be even more eye-opening: the mysterious green plane near the perimeter, the bird-scarers, the relentless attempts of small-time criminals to evade border control, the stressful lives of travelling animals, the remote coolness of the air traffic controllers, the pull of the sky and the amazement that can come from thinking too much about modern aviation. I had a problem with the feasability of the first story in this small collection but in truth that’s a minor cavil; Parsons’s characterisation is good (particularly the seen-it-all humanity of his Border Agency immigration officer Jaswinder Smith) and this successful collection is going on my shelf for keeps. Nice one, Tony.  PY

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Roberto Bolaño, Last Evenings on Earth, 2008

This is a combined edition of two previously released Spanish collections. These insightful stories are all anecdotal and semi-autobiographical but also mostly told in the third person, which inevitably engenders a small aura of mystery about Bolaño himself in the mind of the reader. Bolaño’s subject matter is, as usual, mostly literary: obscure South American poets, Chilean political exiles, Mexican or Spanish settings, reminiscences of lost friends, and left wing writers who like the narrator himself are all living at the far margins of the arts. Bolaño also speaks with consistency: he always writes as if relating the story by voice rather than written words and his story structure is such that you never know quite where he will end up, but wherever it is it’s usually on the cusp of what would be another story, and the endings are often abrupt. It’s impossible to pin down a favourite; they somehow blur together but are all equally very well told. A completely enchanting collection.  PY

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Tew Bunnag, Fragile Days, 2001

Nine stories that work well together as a cross-section of lives lived in Bangkok, from the poorest to the richest. These are less tales of status and stasis than stories of the different social strata intermixing and encountering each other, such as in ‘The Flower Girl’ in which a street orphan is adopted by a rich widow, or ‘Jeed Finds Her Brother’ in which a country girl finds out the truth about her missing brother’s life in Bangkok. These encounters inevitably leave the characters changed, yet somehow everyone at some point is a victim of the city itself, the Big Mango, for the better as often as for the worse. It’s hard to pick any story that stands out above the rest, although for characterisation the final story ‘Love Heals Tammy’ is the one that puts across best how Thais are prepared to look to the positive and be transformed by it. Bunnag also caps off the stories with a non-fiction epilogue titled ‘An Ode to the City’ in which he spells out his feelings on the ugliness of Bangkok itself, while declaring an undying admiration for the people who would dare to live in such a place. This is a lovely collection.  PY

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Tew Bunnag, After the Wave, 2005

Tew Bunnag is a relatively new author on the Thai scene, and this collection of six stories are all centred around the 2004 tsunami which devastated Thailand’s west coast. As mostly stories of ordinary people whose lives are disrupted by that extraordinary event, this being Thailand it’s perhaps inevitable that ghosts also make an appearance as a thread that Bunnag uses to subtly link several of the stories: this was the side to his writing that I found the most enjoyable – how the tsunami somehow also became intertwined with the lives of Thailand’s ghosts; also his frequent references to the sea-gypsies known as the Moken whom Bunnag clearly knows quite well. A good collection that’s impossible to find in bookstores outside Thailand but is available from the small press Mettavisions.  PY

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Kurt Vonnegut, Look at the Birdie, 2009

Fourteen previously unpublished short stories, all enjoyable at the very least, although it would have been useful to know from what stages of Vonnegut’s career each of them were written – were they all recent, or do some perhaps date back decades? Then there’s the genre question: there’s roughly a 50/50 genre/mainstream split, with the more imaginative and fantastical stories not necessarily being the best, although the opening story ‘Confido’ sets a superior quality mark that those following don’t always match. The collection is prefaced with Vonnegut’s 1951 letter to Miller Harris, in which he states his creative position as a writer since quitting his job at General Electric in 1951; it’s an odd way to open a collection such as this as the stories, with a few exceptions, rarely stand out as boldly imaginative. And Vonnegut’s satirical purpose is not always present either, with stories such as ‘The Honor of a Newsboy’, ‘Ed Luby’s Key Club’ and the charmingly sweet ‘A Song for Selma’ being as sentimental about ‘the ordinary little guy’ as Vonnegut probably ever got. For a sharper tone of storytelling the best here is probably ‘Little Drops of Water’ about a spurned lover’s attempts to get back her man, and the most satirical is the clever ‘The Petrified Ants’, which takes a jaundiced view of the Soviet approach to making an amazing scientific discovery. It provides the best laugh-out-loud moment and this collection, admirable as it is, could probably have done with a few more of those.  PY

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Gao Xingjian, Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather, 2004

Six short tales from the 2000 Nobel Prize winner, these are succinct, ordinary stories that focus on small events, even moments, in people’s lives. Nevertheless I didn’t get as much out of this collection as I’d hoped, possibly because Gao’s habitual, philosophical navel-gazing that imbues much of his other translated work is largely absent here, and the results instead feel shackled by a self-imposed restraint – these stories are far more traditionally Chinese, with less emphasis on plot and more focus on emotive and experiential imagery. Nevertheless, these are the stories, all written between 1983 and 1990, that Gao believes best represent what he is now striving to achieve in his fiction, though one can’t help feeling what a loss it is that he had to destroy so much of his creative work in his more energetic youth under the Cultural Revolution.  PY

MORE ON GAO XINGJIAN : ARTSY.NET  |  NOBEL PRIZE BIOGRAPHY  |  WIKIPEDIA

Sebastian Faulks, Pistache, 2006

A while before Faulks had written a new James Bond novel he’d already done a ‘pistache‘ (pastiche, piss-take, whatever) of Ian Fleming, one among many other short pieces for BBC Radio 4’s The Write Stuff that are collected here as flash fictions and poetry written in the styles of others. I can appreciate perfectly about half of them (and they are all indeed rather clever), but that half also reveals my own tastes and prejudices: Martin Amis has his first day at Hogwarts (probably my favourite), James Bond goes shopping, Dan Brown visits the ATM, Enid Blyton’s Famous Five are drafted by the Anti-Terrorist Squad, George Orwell confronts the real 1984, Harold Pinter writes a TV sitcom, Shakespeare composes a speech for Basil Fawlty... and on and on. The mind does boggle a bit at how diverse Faulks has shown he can be, and stay funny and mostly original too.  PY

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Haruki Murakami, after the quake, 2000

For some enigmatic reason Murakami wanted this collection’s English title to be devoid of capital letters and all in lower case. The six stories are all set in February 1995, a month after the devastation of the Kobe earthquake (and a month before the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway that Murakami explored in Underground), and while the characters he writes about were not directly affected by the earthquake it nevertheless created some other far-reaching and more personal seismic shifts. This is Murakami’s focus here, and only the story ‘Super-Frog Saves Tokyo’ has his trademark use of surreal imagery, the rest are very down-to-earth stories and all are told in the third person – again, a departure from previous style. Murakami has a deft way with characterisation and these stories all get their point across with an easy-going precision. ‘Landscape with Flatiron’ cleverly parallels a famous Jack London short story, but for me the best of all is the story ‘Thailand’, about a bitter Japanese woman on holiday there who, with her ex-husband in Kobe, is shown an unusual way to let go of her heart of stone. There are undercurrents of violence present in this collection, much like the seismic dangers that are always present but held at bay in the ground beneath our feet.  PY

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Collin Piprell, Bangkok Knights, 1989

Thailand has a boisterous and sometimes shady breed of expat fiction, something with which you take your chances and inevitably court disappointment. Canadian author and journalist Collin Piprell started out writing guide books for Thailand’s diving community then worked his way into getting his short fiction published in the Bangkok Post. These are bar stories, yet their quality may be a cut above the rest in this often seedy sub-genre of world literature because Bangkok Knights has already received three different editions from three different publishers. If so, this collection probably sets a good ‘bar story’ standard: all of them are gently humorous or bittersweet in tone, neither outlandishly sexist nor patronising, and they share a cast of fairly well characterised (if sometimes rather clichéd) expat Western males combined with an assortment of colourful (if also rather clichéd) Thai females. What I expected to find, and certainly did, is that uneasy distrust that often sees them eyeing each other warily over the cultural barricades while still needing each other for various pre-determined selfish reasons, in fact it’s often this cultural frisson that informs each story’s plot.

The first-person narrator of all the stories remains largely invisible throughout except for a couple of episodes, one which describes a journalistic trip up the Maekok river that goes disastrously wrong (in fact the only non-bar story in the collection and probably the best), and the final outing which is an interesting mixture of relationship and identity crises running in parallel, something that probably comes upon any emotionally unattached, long-time expat resident of Thailand. Piprell has also written three novels – I expect I’ll be reading them all.  PY

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Blake Butler, Scorch Atlas, 2009

Fourteen linked prose stories about the end of the world as we know it, but this is not a polite apocalypse after which there remains some kind of structure to life after the event. No, Butler’s vision is to turn everything completely inside out with nothing left to grasp onto: weather, society, bodies, the mind, and especially families which most of the stories are structured around. However life does go on somehow, and Butler pushes the reader through one impossible event after another with a variety of narrative voices that never question what is happening to them – try ‘The Many Forms of Rain’ for a sample. It’s an extraordinary and often jarring experiment, and as apocalypse fictions go this has to be a benchmark, something that for a long time will be hard to top.  PY

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Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, A Life on Paper, 2010

This first collection of twenty-two of Châteaureynaud’s short stories to appear in English is a very welcome addition to genre bookshelves. His stories may be bizarre and frequently disconcerting, but I’d still struggle to describe Châteaureynaud specifically as a genre writer, at least in the Anglo-Saxon sense of how we define that word: he specifically avoids invoking horror and fear in the reader, instead choosing a far more understated approach to getting across the essence of his surreal mysteries. He occasionally also employs science fictional tropes, although he never lapses into an over-reliance on them to purvey his sense of elusive, dreamy strangeness – he is far more subtle than that. I didn’t actually find the book’s description of Châteaureynaud as “France’s own Kurt Vonnegut” that helpful (apart from the obvious physical resemblance) as Châteaureynaud’s writing possesses an elegance that Vonnegut rarely achieved, but perhaps that’s partly down to the translations by Edward Gauvin, who frequently displays a knack for precision in finding that English mot juste wherever it’s needed – Châteaureynaud is actually more Kafkaesque in his leanings, perhaps with a dash of Calvino. Several stories stand out: ‘The Only Mortal’ is probably the liveliest (and funniest) story here, ‘Delaunay the Broker’ is masterful in the way it compounds its central mystery, but for sheer unique strangeness it’s hard to better the eponymous ‘A Life on Paper’ in this collection. If this ever gets a paperback edition – which it really deserves, and further collections would be very welcome too – then I expect it will sell very well, and Châteaureynaud deserves to become a much more familiar name to English language readers.  PY

•  Edward Gauvin’s translation of A Life on Paper won the Long Form Category of the first Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Award in 2011.

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Woody Allen, Mere Anarchy, 2007

Picked up on a whim, I was rather impressed with this collection of shorts, mostly because it was a discovery that the Woody Allen you read in print bears little if any resemblance to the Woody Allen you see on the big screen, or even the Woody Allen who used to do stand-up. It’s still absurd neurotic comedy, intellectually engaging and (often very) linguistically dense, and throughout he adopts the style of his feuilletoniste literary hero S.J. Perelman who preceded him as a humourous writer for The New Yorker, where most of these pieces first appeared. He has his moments: some stories are well thought out if too briefly explored to do them justice and might even benefit from being longer; some are even science fictional, the cleverest by far being ‘Strung Out’, if you can overcome Allen’s tendencies towards female objectification. As this is his first collection of short fiction for more than a quarter of a century it would be interesting to see how it compares with one of his previous collections, but as Allen seems so immersed in the feuilleton style I suspect this must be something of a continuation.  PY

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Kressmann Taylor, Address Unknown, 1938

A very brief and neat exposure of the realities of Nazism, written by an acutely aware observer in the distant US before the Second World War had even begun. Two German-American friends and art dealers, one a Jew, conduct some friendly correspondence after the other returns to Munich in 1933, where he then falls under the enchanting spell of Adolf Hitler. A small but tragic event follows in Munich which, suffice to say, ensures a brilliant response. There's not much else that can be said about Address Unknown without giving the game away. America was largely uninterested in what was going on in Germany at this time but over in Europe word spread about this short serialised work, ensuring it was copied and translated (Steinbeck’s excellent The Moon Is Down, written as anti-Nazi propaganda four years later, underwent a similar propagation), inevitably ending up on Germany’s list of banned books. The simplicity and potency of Taylor’s idea ensured her a large and immediate readership, then after the war was over it was largely forgotten until its reissue in 1995 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps. Another interesting aspect is the vehement rejection of liberalism which broadly echoes some of the same criticism you hear from the American far right today. Certainly one of the better 30-minute reads I have had this year.  PY

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Yasunari Kawabata, Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, 1988

— In these brief and intense tales, all aimed at some heightened perception or ineffable truth and many based on dreams expressed or implied, we find loneliness, love, the passage of time, and death. Palm-of-the-Hand Stories captures the astonishing variety and complexity of form, setting, character, voice, and tone of one of the twentieth century’s greatest literary talents.

Seventy miniature short stories that Kawabata wrote between 1923 and 1972. It’s said the essence of Kawabata’s writing can be found in these brief episodes in Japanese lives more so than in his novels, but in truth they often feel like fragments of larger stories that Kawabata may have discarded then stripped down to their absolute minimum. Many end with a character staring into the distance, perhaps wondering something, or with an unresolved issue still hanging uncomfortably in the reader’s mind, but there’s also a sense of give-and-take here because while Kawabata often goes for the minimalist effect he’s also careful not to remove the points and markers that can give his characters an often luminous form. It’s interesting to read short stories composed differently from the way we are used to experiencing them, though the reader may still be left with a small sense of dissatisfaction with many, although those written nearer the end of Kawabata’s career are rounded off with more depth: best of all is the brief, impressive ghost story ‘Immortality’, the imaginative flourish of ‘Snow’, and ‘Gleanings from Snow Country’, loosely connected to his famous novel Snow Country. Altogether gentle and enjoyable, but frequently too slight.  PY

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Banana Yoshimoto, Hardboiled / Hard Luck, 1999

Two novellas that explore how two slightly unconventional Japanese women react to situations after people close to them have died, the first discovering how her awareness of the spiritual world has opened up, the second discovering how the circumstances of her late sister’s life has now given her own a new direction. Yoshimoto focuses on seemingly irrevelant details that at first make the stories feel too mundane until their importance to the development of the story is revealed. The first tale is quietly unsettling, the second an understated gem of quiet observation.  PY

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Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles, 1934

Schulz was said to be the most promising Polish Jewish writer between the two World Wars until he was shot dead for no apparent reason in 1942 by a German soldier on the streets of his home town Drogobych, and this collection contains all that survives of his work. These are very private stories that superficially radiate Kafka, and Schulz goes far into the private world of his family and the central figure of his lonely, mad father whose erratic and strange behaviour is an inevitable preoccupation. This is also what drive Schulz’s stories into more imaginative territory as he watches him repeatedly break the bonds of normality and escape into other, freer states of mental being (though rarely successfully), and the failures of his father in turn seems to drive Schulz back towards the kind of idyllic summer innocence found in the first story, ‘August’. It's sometimes as if the world is all too much for him, a sentiment that drives Schulz’s artistic purpose of ‘maturing into childhood’. Fantastic elements are also here aplenty in the stories ‘Cockroaches’, ‘The Comet’ and ‘Cinnamon Shops’, a few lines of which were a pivotal source of inspiration for China Miéville’s The City & The City. Encountering Schulz’s private world can be more difficult than you might expect, but it does provide some highly entertaining and angst-ridden food for thought if you let it get under your skin.  PY

MORE ON BRUNO SCHULZ : THE ART OF BRUNO SCHULZ  |  SCHULZIAN  |  WIKIPEDIA

Salman Rushdie, East, West, 1994

Nine stories, three of Indians in India, three that exhibit aspects of Rushdie’s own peculiar way with Western fictional forms, and three of Indians living in England. Those middle three are notable for their imaginative diversity but they don’t sit well with the rest: we have a bizarre (and somewhat unreadable) abstraction on Hamlet, a scenario where fictional characters are infiltrating the real world at an auction of Dorothy’s slippers from The Wizard of Oz, and a courtship with Queen Isabella in the fevered mind of Christopher Columbus (a story which, somehow, has Bruce Chatwin written all over it). The remaining six more straightforward stories show how Rushdie makes the act of spinning very engaging tales of ordinary Indians and their families look easy, including the very original ‘Chekov and Zulu’, something which could qualify as a piece of very Indian and very erudite Star Trek fan fiction.  PY

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Helon Habila, Waiting for an Angel, 2005

The first story in this linked collection won the 2001 Caine Prize for African writing: a short tale about Lomba, a Nigerian journalist and political prisoner who finds himself writing love poetry, Cyrano-like, to the inept Prison Superintendent’s girlfriend. Habila went back to this character to flesh out a history and chart how he went from a girl-obsessed, soul music-loving arts correspondent to having his eyes opened by the brutality of the Abacha regime of the 1990s. A grim and depressing realism provides the detailed background which, without its roll-call of impressively idiosyncratic characters, would otherwise make this a hard book to like.  PY

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Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Sightseeing, 2004

A lively and colourful collection of stories of everyday Thai life, all set in either Bangkok or the beaches of Thailand, where the demands of Western tourism define the lives of some of the disenfranchised locals. Lapcharoensap, an Americanised Thai, writes in such a refreshing and uncomplicated way that even the worst fates to befall his colourful characters are somehow given a redeeming twist, portraying his people as unremittingly optimistic in the face of considerable personal adversity. One down side is that several stories are left open-ended and feel like the opening chapters of unfinished novels, nevertheless, he’s clearly a very promising writer to watch.  PY